SOURCE: Dyck, Andrew R. “On Digenis Akritas Grottaferrata Version Book 5.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 24, no. 2 (summer 1983): 185-92.

In the following essay, Dyck analyzes the bride-theft motif in Digenes Akrites.

Only two versions of the epic Digenis Akritas narrate the hero's encounter with the daughter of the Syrian emir Haplorrhabdes: Book 5 of the Grottaferrata version (G) and Book 6 of the version Z which the latest editor, E. Trapp, reconstructs from the Trebizond manuscript and the Andros manuscript now in Athens.¹ For this material, however, as Trapp notes,² Z is likely to represent a contamination of its source, Y, with γ, the source of the Grottaferrata version; hence the following discussion will be based on the more authentic Grottaferrata version alone. The episodic character of this material has been previously recognized, but the appropriate conclusions have not, I think, as yet been drawn from it. Thus, Kyriakidis hypothesizes that the...